by Russ Miles & Sylvain Hellegouarch (of Simplicity Itself), 9th February, 2016
I get asked all the time "Why Microservices?", mainly by lovely people who have got a little caught up in the term itself. The question is often followed with something size-related such as "How big should my microservices be?".
This is not wrong! After all, 'micro' is in the name ... unfortunately.
The answer though is a little more complicated, as explained in our Antifragile Software book. The main reason I've seen for people to adopt microservices is that:
"The business needs to adapt and we need our software to keep up!"
As agility has been introduced and refined into the business the bottleneck often shifts to the software itself. I call this the "Elephant in the Standup" in my talks; the elephant is all the software you have that is now going to be in conflict with today's changes.
Software is essential to the modern business and you only have to check out the excellent Phoenix Project book to get a wonderful explanation of how software likely is your business. Unfortunately that means if your software is slow to react to the increasingly rapid change in business need, then it is the software that becomes the inertia in the system.
Genuine complaints from the business usually take the form of:
This is why we need adaptable software, and microservices offer a great opportunity to enable it.
This is not wrong! After all, 'micro' is in the name ... unfortunately.
The answer though is a little more complicated, as explained in our Antifragile Software book. The main reason I've seen for people to adopt microservices is that:
"The business needs to adapt and we need our software to keep up!"
As agility has been introduced and refined into the business the bottleneck often shifts to the software itself. I call this the "Elephant in the Standup" in my talks; the elephant is all the software you have that is now going to be in conflict with today's changes.
Software is essential to the modern business and you only have to check out the excellent Phoenix Project book to get a wonderful explanation of how software likely is your business. Unfortunately that means if your software is slow to react to the increasingly rapid change in business need, then it is the software that becomes the inertia in the system.
Genuine complaints from the business usually take the form of:
- lack of flexibility
- poor performance
- incapacity to deliver fast enough
- loss of confidence in the development teams...
This is why we need adaptable software, and microservices offer a great opportunity to enable it.
What does the business need?
At a basic level, most business leaders would agree that they want to:
● Address new, and potentially not yet anticipated, opportunity
● Listen and learn from their market and customers
● Re-align the products themselves, quickly, to these learnings
In short, the modern business needs to adapt on a continuous and relatively unplanned basis. When a business cannot adapt fast enough, it fails to address those goals and opportunities.
By designing software to thrive on change will the software delivery be able to gain its true value as partner in success of the company.
Software that thrives on change is Antifragile Software. Antifragile Software through Microservices is our mission here at Russ Miles & Associates.
● Address new, and potentially not yet anticipated, opportunity
● Listen and learn from their market and customers
● Re-align the products themselves, quickly, to these learnings
In short, the modern business needs to adapt on a continuous and relatively unplanned basis. When a business cannot adapt fast enough, it fails to address those goals and opportunities.
By designing software to thrive on change will the software delivery be able to gain its true value as partner in success of the company.
Software that thrives on change is Antifragile Software. Antifragile Software through Microservices is our mission here at Russ Miles & Associates.
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